by Tony Isaacs
(NaturalNews) Half of the doctors on the panel that recommended a whopping increase in statin drug use have ties to Big Pharma. This past Tuesday, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology issued the first new guidelines in a decade for preventing heart attacks and strokes – guidelines which called for one-third of all adults to consider taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.
Doctors claim the new guidelines will limit how many people with low heart risks are put on statins simply because of a cholesterol number. However, under the new advice, one-third of U.S. adults would meet the threshold to consider taking a statin, more than twice the 15 percent of adults who are recommended statins under current guidelines.
The justification for the panel having half its members with ties to Big Pharma: Ties between heart doctors and Big Pharma are so extensive that it is almost impossible to find a large group of doctors who have no industry ties. How reassuring!
The new guidelines for recommending statin drugs
In addition to continuing to target people with higher LDL cholesterol, the panel also recommended consideration of statins for:
- People who already have heart disease.
- People ages 40 to 75 with a higher estimated 10-year risk of heart disease.
- People ages 40 to 75 with Type 2 diabetes.
The high cholesterol myth exposed
For years, mainstream medicine and its doctors have been promoting high cholesterol as a dangerous cause of heart attacks in order to sell huge quantities of highly profitable, patented statin drugs. The truth is that high cholesterol is merely a marker for increased heart attack risk and not an actual cause.
The high cholesterol myth took a huge blow last year when renowned heart surgeon Dr. Dwight Lundell stepped forward to expose how embracing the high cholesterol myth was wrong and the harm that has resulted. Dr. Lundell stated that the recommendations to lower cholesterol as well as those to severely restrict fat intake “are no longer scientifically or morally defensible.”
Dr. Lundell explained that the real culprit for heart disease was inflammation in our arterial walls and “injury and inflammation in our blood.”
“Simply stated,” Dr. Lundell said, “without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel.”
See: http://www.naturalnews.com.
Dangerous statin drugs increase heart disease risks and more
The recommendations for increased statin use flies in the face of increased evidence of the harm that statin drugs cause – including harm to the very cardiovascular system they are supposed to protect. One of the worst effects caused by statin drugs is that they severely limit natural production of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10). CoQ10 is vital for muscle health and longevity – and the heart happens to be one of the largest muscles in the body.
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